OnePlus 2 Hands-On: So Good, it Makes Me Want to Go Off-Contract

One year ago, the OnePlus One became the best off-contract smartphone you could buy. An unheard of Chinese company managed to deliver a high-quality Android handset for a crazy-low £229 price. Now, it looks like that awesomeness wasn’t a fluke. Behold: the OnePlus 2.

Left: old and busted. Right: new hotness

Starting at £239, the new OnePlus 2 is only a hair more expensive than the original, and yet it’s improved in so many ways I barely know where to begin. It might just be faster to tell you what’s missing: it doesn’t have a gorgeous 2K screen or wireless charging like the Galaxy S6, and it doesn’t have a removable SD card, battery, or fancy manual camera controls like the LG G4.

Oh, and there’s no stylus. You weren’t expecting a stylus, were you?

Got all that? Then it’s time to talk about just how beastly this phone actually is. Octa-core Snapdragon 810 processor? Check. LTE? Check. Two nano-SIMs for hopping carriers? You bet. USB Type-C so you’re ready for the future of charging? Definitely. A fingerprint reader? Yep! Plus a 5.5-inch 1080p display, a 13-megapixel OmniVision camera with optical image stabilisation and laser focusing, and up to 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM.

Yet the most impressive parts of the OnePlus One have little to do with specs. They’re about how this phone feels. (It feels excellent.)

Chassis

The moment you touch this phone, you won’t believe it costs just £239. Why? Because in terms of materials and build quality, it’s only a stone’s throw away from the best you can buy: Samsung, LG and HTC devices that cost hundreds more.

If you turned up your nose at last year’s OnePlus One because it was made of plastic, you’ll do a double-take when a OnePlus 2 shows up. The only plastic you’ll find on this sucker is the flexible kind you’ll find when you pry up the removable rear cover. No more crappy plastic buttons, either: it’s all precise, tactile metal for your power button, volume rocker, and (my personal favourite) three-way mute switch. More on that later.

The metal does make the phone nearly half an ounce heavier (at 175 grams versus 162 grams) and it’s nearly half a millimetre thicker (at 9.85mm) but I didn’t find myself minding one bit. It’s also a millimetre shorter in both directions, and I actually think it may improve the ergonomics. The One was a bit wide for my tastes; the 2 fits easier into my hand.

I do kind of miss the metal lip that gave the OnePlus One a distinct look even from the front, but the 2 still keeps the same spirit with a chamfered metal edge beneath its Gorilla Glass. Depending on the size of your hand, it might still add a little bit of grip.

But glass and metal is only half the story when it comes to tactile delight. The rest comes in the form of the OnePlus’s optional rear covers, which use actual wood (bamboo, rosewood, black apricot) or Kevlar for a really awesome look and feel. Even stock, the OnePlus 2’s “sandstone black” rear cover feels pretty great (and definitely far grippier and grittier than the one on the original phone) but real Kevlar or bamboo is where it’s at.

I’ve gotta say the Kevlar’s my favorite so far, but I could actually see myself buying more than one and swapping ‘em out after a while. It’s a level of personalisation we’ve never really seen in a smartphone before: even with the Moto X, which let you colour-coordinate your phone when you bought it direct from the factory, you’d be forever stuck with your choices.

Screen

The screen is pretty much always the most important part of a smartphone. I don’t need to tell you this, because you’re probably reading this article by swiping on a smartphone screen right now. And the original OnePlus One’s screen was, how-do-we-say, not particularly wonderful. I vividly remember taking pictures side by side with the Xiaomi Mi Note and the OnePlus One a few months back (two phones with the exact same Sony camera sensor) and wondering why the pictures seemed so much worse on the OnePlus. It turned out that it was actually just the screen, which looked washed out.

Well, the 1080p LCD screen on the OnePlus 2 is bright and beautiful by comparison. The company claims it reaches 600 nits of brightness, more than the iPhone 6 Plus. Personally, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as gorgeous as the 2K OLED screens you’ll find on a Samsung Galaxy S6 or as glassy and smooth as some of Apple’s displays (I can definitely see rows of pixels if I look close) but for a £239 phone it’s outrageously good.

Camera

And speaking of the camera, it’s far better as well. While I definitely didn’t get to take enough shots to tell how it stacks up against an iPhone 6 Plus, Galaxy S6, LG G4 or Lumia 1020 (the smartphone camera elite) the OnePlus 2’s new 13-megapixel Omnivision sensor is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that megapixels mean nothing. Same number of megapixels as the previous phone, but MUCH better images right out of the box.

Here are a couple of 100 per cent crops from the OnePlus One and OnePlus 2 in good light. Just look how much less noise and how much more detail you see in the image on the right.

And impressively, the image from the OnePlus 2 was half the file-size. Here are the originals:

Have to say the OnePlus 2 pic is lacking a bit of contrast, though.

The Catches

So if this phone is so great, why you run out and pre-order it right now? Particularly since it’s invite only, the company has limited stock, and there’s no guarantee how quickly they’ll make more?

Well, there are the usual review caveats. We’ve barely tested this device. We haven’t even tried to make a phone call with it, let alone use apps for longer than a few minutes. (They seemed to run smoothly, but isn’t that true of all new phones these days?) We haven’t tried to take a lot of pictures in challenging environments, and we have no idea if the (slightly larger 3300mAh battery) will still put up a fight given the new processor and bright new screen. The new fingerprint reader felt awesome and quick and accepted my fingerprint from any angle, but who can say whether it’ll be reliable in a pinch without more testing?

It’s got an awesome futureproof new USB Type-C port for charging, but that means none of your micro-USB cables will work. You’ll need new ones ($5 (UK pricing TBA) each for OnePlus’s cool new reversible cable, which is admittedly a pretty good deal.)

And if you want to pay only £239, you’ll have to wait an unspecified period: to start with, only the £289 model with 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM will be on sale.